In which I decide to start following someone else’s menu rather than getting off my arse and designing my own.

As anyone who knows me will doubtless have heard countless times before, I am a little bit in love with Jack Monroe. (I do sometimes panic that she might be a little sizeist, but that probably has as much to do with my neuroses as it does with her opinions!) She’s revolutionised the way I cook and eat, and is undoubtedly one of my personal heroes.

The other day, I noticed a few links from commenters to one of her posts that made me suddenly wonder why I’d never tried to find any other blogs posting incredibly cheap delicious recipes in the UK. I now have a whole list of them bookmarked, and one of them – Thrifty Lesley – has MEAL PLANS. Three of them, actually, but the third is brand new and wasn’t there when I was doing this on Friday. I am probably the only person I know who gets actively excited by the thought of finding £1-a-day meal plans on the internet. I squeeed aloud.

So anyway, I got all excited about this and instantly decided to put together a Tesco order that would do me for the two that were there, because there was bugger all real food in the house and I’m in a rut of not cooking at the moment and I really urgently need to get more of a handle on my accursed finances. It’ll come on Monday and then I’ll have probably the best part of a month’s worth of DELICIOUS FOOD for a satisfyingly small amount of money*. I’m not following the plans exactly, for a whole host of conveniently bullet-pointed reasons:

I spend two or three nights a week – and sometimes more – in Feltham at my boyfriend’s flat, where for obvious reasons of being in his home I’m eating his food instead. So the “week” of eating is actually more than that for me.

I’m a vegetarian, and some of the recipes contain bacon and various other flavours of dead animal. (Though not many of them, because meat is expensive yo.) I also dislike olives intensely – and am mildly allergic to them, though nothing like as seriously or severely as I used to be – so I’ve left those out. Because they are ungodly disgusting and evil 😉

The recipes are designed for two people and there is only one of me. Except where there isn’t. I’m basically doing a dinner or two a week for three adults, and everything else just for the one. And I don’t want to quite cut everything dead in half, because…well look, I have what you might call a Healthy Appetite, alright? If you were trying to be polite and didn’t want to offend me. Also because if I do let myself be hungry on the basis that it won’t kill me I turn into a raging bitch queen from hell, and my poor long-suffering housemates don’t need that shit.

I’ll have to rearrange some of the dinners to use up the stuff that goes off first, because I’ve bought ALL THE THINGS all at once.

I’ll kind of be making a lot of it up as a go along, but I am intending to blog about it on account of how the entire world desperately needs to know what I have for breakfast every morning. It’s okay, guys: you won’t have to wait too long for your next exciting update on What Abi Puts In Her Mouth!**

* I have been blessed with a fairy godmother again. When did I get so lucky? Somewhere in my youth or childhood/I must have done something good…

** I’m not planning on telling you everything that I put in my mouth. This is supposed to be my Professional Writer Lady blog, after all.

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